"I had cast my lot with a Soldier, and where he was was home to me." ~ Martha Summerhayes

03 September 2012

Exploring Chinen

Forgive my pregnant emotions for a moment, but today was probably our last day free to adventure with our family-as-it-currently-stands. Of course, said family is only going to get awesomer with an even boy/girl ratio, but it still made me pause for a moment. We chose Chinen from our excellent Okinawa Explorer guide book (I recommend it--don't know why we haven't cracked it until now) because, well...just because. We hadn't been out into that little area before. (Chinen is the pink.)

With ATM and gas stops, going back home for the map, bakery detour, etc. it took us 2 hours to get out there. Eva girl was extremely cranky by this time, and really, who can blame her? So we made our first priority the "glass-bottomed" boat at Chinen Marine Leisure Center. The port was extremely quaint and the bottom was more like a slit, but it ended up being more than adequate. She had an amazing time on the ride and saw "Nemo and his dad" and "not Dory but then we went over there and saw Dory".

It was a beautiful day, not too hot in the shade of the boat, and breezy but the ocean was completely calm.

She has this face that I like to think of as contemplating life, the universe, and everything. She's pretty contemplative these days, and that mind is going a mile a minute.

After 25 minutes and five different stops over different reefs, we had to turn around. There were tears.

We then headed up into the hills to visit Cafe Curcuma, one of the best restaurants in southern Okinawa (we had no idea until we saw it on our guidebook map). There was quite a wait, but it was worth it.

(The PF did a better job with this style picture. It helps that she is his female spitting image--sometimes I'm shocked that my offspring could look so much like someone else.)

And we had this view the whole time:

I didn't see that UFO at the time, and it apparently wasn't on my lens, so I'm going to label is a ghost UFO. Pretty special. After lunch, of course, we all hit food coma and had to go home. We did not even scratch the surface of the sites in Chinen (the historical walk sounds interesting, as do the sacred sites) and will certainly be back.